The sound is distorted or gritty
This is the most common one, and it is almost always the boost being pushed past what the source can take. Past the red mark on the slider the audio itself starts to break up, before the extension ever touches it. There is nothing to recover at that point, so the fix is to back off or to let the limiter work harder.
- Come down off the red. Drop the slider below the red mark and listen again. On most tracks the difference between 300% and 500% is smaller than it looks.
- Check the limiter is on. Open the extension settings and find Limiter. It is on out of the box, so if it got switched off, switch it back.
- Set Character to Clean. Loud plays louder but lets saturation shave the peaks, which is exactly the grit you are hearing.
- Raise Maximum reduction. Around 5 to 6 dB is the cleanest spot and the default. Lower values give denser bass but clearly more distortion.
- Turn the bass down. Bass boost and the Mix presets make the limiter work far harder than volume alone. If you run both, expect to give something back.
If you changed a lot and lost track, Reset limiter to default puts the whole card back where it started.
No sound after turning it on
- Make sure the tab is really playing. The extension boosts a tab that already has sound. It cannot start playback for you.
- Reload the tab, then turn it on again. This clears almost every case where a page grabbed the audio before the extension did.
- Read what the popup says. When a tab cannot be boosted, it tells you so instead of failing quietly.
It will not turn on for this page
Some pages are off limits to every extension, not just this one. The browser itself blocks them:
- Browser pages - anything starting with chrome://, including settings and the new tab page
- The Chrome Web Store - extensions are not allowed to touch it
- Tabs with no audio - there is nothing to capture yet
Nothing is broken when this happens and there is no workaround, because the limit sits in the browser rather than in the extension.
It sounds thin on laptop speakers
Not a fault. The extension works on the stereo image, so bass, space and the voice lift land properly on headphones. Small laptop speakers physically cannot reproduce most of what the bass modes and 8D add, so a lot of the effect simply has nowhere to go.
I lost my settings
Right after a reset the popup offers Restore previous with your last values, which is the quickest way back.
Worth knowing: everything lives only in your browser's local storage. Nothing is synced to an account, so settings do not travel between computers, and uninstalling removes all of it. You can also wipe everything deliberately with Clear all extension data in the settings.
Report a bug or ask for a feature
The extension settings have a Got a bug or an idea? box. It sends only what you type. No account, no e-mail, no sign-in. That is the fastest way to reach me and it is read.
If you would rather do it in the open, there is GitHub issues.
When something is broken, the useful details are: the site, the browser, and what you had switched on. It saves a round trip.
Still stuck
The changelog is worth a look if something changed recently and you want to know what. The privacy policy covers what the extension does and does not collect, which is nothing.